Notebook thirty-one has about eleven pages left in it, which in my house is a countdown. The ending is somewhere in those pages. It has been somewhere in those pages for three weeks.
What the last week actually looks like
Up at half six, at the desk by seven, and by half nine I have written four hundred words and taken out six hundred. This is normal and I still take it personally. Then a walk to Blackrock, into the water whatever it is doing, and back for a second go at the same four hundred words.
The wrong things I have started doing, in order of how much time they waste: rereading the opening, which is finished; retyping chapters that are also finished; and looking up the tide tables for a stretch of coast that does not exist.
A first draft is not a bad version of the book. It is the only way to find out what the book is.
Somebody said that to me at Annaghmakerrig in 2021 and I have been repeating it ever since as if it were mine.
Eleven pages. Ask me in a fortnight.